NATO: Literature

The trouble with alliances, Pericles said 2,395
years ago, is that "the common cause imperceptibly decays." NATO's
common cause is not decaying but it has vastly changed in the 15
years since NATO's founding. As the threat of Soviet aggression in
Western Europe receded, the alliance became a political assembly of
independent-minded states rather than a military coalition huddling
under the exclusive U.S. nuclear umbrella. What NATO has yet to prove
is that it can rise to broader, subtler challenges. As Dean Rusk put
it: "NATO must adapt itself to a situation in which the Communist
threat takes more...